Page - 88 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

88 siting futurity first theater in Vienna to hire a woman as its general director, Emmy Werner, in 1988. The second woman to serve as the Volks theater’s general di- rector, Anna Badora, originally came to Vienna from Krakow in 1979 to study directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, the first woman ever to do so. After having staged Emilia Galotti at the Volks theater during Emmy Warner’s tenure, she worked as an assistant and freelance director at a number of German theaters in Cologne, Basel, Essen, Ulm, Munich, and Darmstadt. Badora was then contracted in Mainz for five years as Director of Act- ing, and in Düsseldorf and Graz for ten years each as General Director before coming to the Volks theater in 2015. It was on Badora’s watch that Lazarus premiered on May 9, 2018, three months after the German-language premier in Düsseldorf.10 Badora’s five-year, unrenewed term at the Volks theater proved highly contentious. Upon arriving, she replaced all but four of the ensemble’s actors with ones she brought with her from Graz and heaped an enormous workload on them — in her first season the repertoire featured the work of seventeen directors from nine different countries (“18 Neue Schauspieler entitled “Soll man Brecht im Westen spielen?” [“Should one perform Brecht in the West?”], which was printed in Der Monat (1961), Torberg declared that “Bertolt Brecht, daran ist nicht zu rütteln, war ein Anhänger der kommunistischen Diktatur. Er war ihr im vollen, ursprünglichen Sinn des Wortes verschrieben, er hat sein Werk und seine Person — die sich so wenig voneinander trennen lassen, wie sein Werk sich in einen künstlerischen und in einen politischen Teil aufspalten ließe — restlos und vorsätzlich in den Dienst der kommunistischen Sache gestellt, und er hat für diese Sache Propaganda gemacht, wo immer er konnte. [“There can be no denying that Bertold Brecht was a supporter of the communist dictatorship. He was committed to it in the full, original sense of the word. He put his life and his work, which are as hard to separate as the artistic and political parts of his work, intentionally and completely at the service of the communist mission, and he propagated for it wherever he could”] (Torberg). 10 As coincidence would have it, just as Badora had previously worked in Düsseldorf, the director of the Düsseldorf performance, Mattias Hart- mann, had worked in Vienna at the Burg theater from 2009–14, leaving under the shadow of a financial scandal.